Vistas of the field: examining quality indicators of health and physical education journals

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, we use the field of Health and Physical Education (H/PE) to explain the limitations, nuances, and inconsistencies of three global, digitally available, and regularly updated systems: library holdings, metrics, and altmetrics. We understand these systems through the analogy of seeing different vistas of a landscape when driving a car: looking in the rear-view mirror (i.e. library holdings as past indicators of quality) and out the side windows (i.e. metrics and altmetrics as current indicators). Before examining these measures, we acknowledge the neoliberal audit culture and outline our understanding of the H/PE ‘field’. To identify H/PE journals, we searched databases, websites, and literature, generating a list of 202 potentially relevant journals. After three rounds of refinement, 13 journals remained that: (1) focused on health and/or physical education as a school subject (including H/PE teacher education), (2) had official metrics, and (3) self-identified as ‘Social Sciences – Education’ and had more than 20% of the papers in the last two volumes focus on H/PE. For each of these journals, we provide the WorldCat library holdings, metrics (i.e. Journal Impact Factor, Journal h-index, CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank, and Source Normalized Impact per Paper), and altmetrics. We explain how to understand these measures, as well as their contested, problematic and, often, confusing dimensions. Overall, we argue that it is crucial for scholars to understand these measures so that they can critically reflect on how measurement shapes their research and professional lives.